The Washington Post - 30.08.2019

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THE WASHINGTON POST

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FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019

Popeyes, Roy Rogers and Royal

Farms. And there are more differ-

ences between them than the

presence of an apostrophe (Bo-

jangles’) or the absence of one

(Popeyes). Read on for an opin-

ionated, highly unscientific yet

completely true ranking of the

area’s best franchises to get

whole, cut up, bone-in fried chick-

en (please, no nuggets, tenders or

wingettes).

CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE

Michel Richard, to the down-and-

dirty — er, make that delicious —

mom-and-pop carryouts such as

Crown on H Street NE, where

they serve collard greens as a side.

Yum. Then there’s hot fried chick-

en, Korean and Japanese fried

chicken, popcorn fried chicken

and so on.

Somewhere in the middle lie

the chains.

In the DMV, there are six:

Bojangles’, KFC, Pollo Campero,

hawking it, including one espe-

cially famous Kentucky colonel?

But sometimes a drumstick is

just a drumstick. Is there a way to

uncomplicate one tiny corner of

the fried chicken universe?

There’s no shortage of fried

chicken from which to choose in

the D.C. area, from the high-end

offerings of such chefs as David

Burke, David Deshaies, To m Pow-

er and Cedric Maupillier, all fol-

lowing in the footsteps of the late

on “Big Brother.”

Then there’s the fraught his-

tory of the deceptively simple

meal — one complicated by race,

gender and economics, as argued

by Psyche Williams-Forson in her

provocative book “Building

Houses Out of Chicken Legs:

Black Women, Food and Power,”

which asks this question (among

others): If African American

women invented fried chicken,

why are there so many white men

BY MICHAEL O’SULLIVAN

F

ried chicken is compli-
cated.
Spicy or mild? White
or dark? Original or ex-
tra crispy? Fancy or
fast? On the bone or in a bun?
(Yes, Popeyes makes the best
fried chicken sandwich, but
that’s another story.) It’s a dish
that is eaten off both white table-
cloths and at h ome w hile binging

From the Cover

PHOTO BY BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST

When it comes to

their crunch, not all

chains are equal

From Popeyes to Bojangles’:

A pecking order of fried chicken